Give me Enmore and the Madmen
Stretch of King Street to the city.
And my flat has four rooms, an
antique gas water heater above the bath, and a window that looks over Enmore
Road to a café owned by a tall Russian woman who wears red corsets.
And Louisa, the girl who runs the
shoe-shop underneath my flat, wears an oversized hand-knitted old woollen
jumper. She likes going barefoot and my second-hand poster of Patti Smith. She knows
every Tom Waits song I own and in winter, after six o’clock and all the people
who wander in to fondle her shoes, we sit in her back room and drink Toby’s coffee
from old chipped cups and berate the general public until midnight, when she
walks me home, down Marian Lane or Reiby Lane and some nights hours of lanes.
And in summer, after six o’clock
and all the people, she pads shoeless up my very own set of cat-piss rankled
stairs and we climb through my window onto her rusty awning where we drink red
wine from those same chipped cups and accept the problems of the world or sing Grapefruit
Moon or cry to Blue Valentines.
Sunday early-mornings the air has
something cold aluminium about it. I make two crunchy-peanut-butter sandwiches,
buy two black coffees, walk to Victoria Park. Old Merv smiles horribly from his
cardboard nest, slinks into daylight. We share breakfast and talk poetics and
whether Brennan was good or flawed, right or at fault. He sings me a lost
folk-song before I go, in a voice meant for recital halls.
And being Sunday, I cut across to
George Street and the Bookshop Stretch. At Kinokuniya pay too much for another
meagre book of Kathryn Lomer’s verse and just enough for a book on bees for
Louisa.
Down now, to the Quay to
people-watch and read and wonder.
